{"id":243,"date":"2010-03-04T06:32:57","date_gmt":"2010-03-04T12:32:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/gazette\/2010\/03\/04\/100304_randomthursday\/"},"modified":"2022-04-12T16:57:36","modified_gmt":"2022-04-12T21:57:36","slug":"100304_randomthursday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2010\/03\/04\/100304_randomthursday\/","title":{"rendered":"Random Thursday"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Scattershooting while pondering one of life&#8217;s most important questions: will Pamela Anderson&#8217;s samba outfit on this season&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/abc.go.com\/shows\/dancing-with-the-stars\/cast-announcement\"><i>Dancing With the Stars<\/i><\/a> be sufficiently intriguing to offset the appearance of Kate Gosselin? (Seriously, though: <i>Pamela Anderson<\/i>?!)<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>You may have seen Rube Goldbergesque stunts before, but I assure you that you&#8217;ve seen nothing like this video from the pop group OKGo.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/qybUFnY7Y8w\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Here&#8217;s a bit of local news you Midlanders might not have yet heard. The pastor of Midland&#8217;s First Baptist Church, Gary Dyer, is leaving at the end of this month to pastor a church in Austin. Dr. Dyer has been at FBC Midland for about fifteen years; he was just the third pastor my wife and I have had since coming to Midland in 1982. FBC is, in my opinion, at something of a crossroads, and the choice of a new pastor will be critical in determining its future direction. But, I guess you can say that about any new pastor.<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: .9em;\">I found out today that one of my high school English teachers passed away, just short of his 90th birthday. Mr. Skylstad was born in Norway and came to America as a teen. There weren&#8217;t too many Norwegian immigrants in Fort Stockton. I remember him as having a great love of the English language and literature, and of teaching. I can&#8217;t honestly say that his class represented a great turning point in my life, but I do believe that he reinforced a love of reading and learning that I was fortunate enough to acquire at an early age. He also tried to teach critical thinking, something that I perceive to be sadly lacking in some of today&#8217;s educational tactics.<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: .9em;\">The practicality of <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cerevellum.com\/\">this gadget<\/a> for a bicyclist probably depends on the traffic conditions faced by the rider, but it has possibilities. I never ride on the street without a rearview mirror, so the ability to monitor traffic behind me via a video screen isn&#8217;t something I need. But, of course, when it comes to geeky toys, <i>need<\/i> is basically irrelevant. Plus, it allows you to record an accident, which should result in some new dramatic YouTube videos.<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: .9em;\">I have never claimed to be a graphic designer, but in my line of work, I can&#8217;t avoid tasks like coming up with color schemes for websites. Adobe&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/kuler.adobe.com\/\">Kuler<\/a> is an excellent tool for the job, but it&#8217;s complicated and a bit of overkill. That&#8217;s why I&#8217;m thrilled to discover <a href=\"http:\/\/www.colorschemegenerator.com\/\">Elvan Online<\/a>, a color generator that provides sliders for varying the colors, and one-click generation of a wide variety of palettes derived from a single color.<\/li>\n<li style=\"margin-top: .9em;\">Finally, while dealing with color palettes is plenty intimidating, riding a dirt bike on a rocky 12&#8243; wide trail at the edge of a sheer cliff is downright nausea-inducing. Exhibit A (you&#8217;ll have to click over to watch it on YouTube; apparently, it might cause 12 year olds to try to ride their motorcycles through the Andes, or something):\n<p style=\"text-align: center; margin-top: 1em;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/30Ow92F78fY\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p style=\"line-height: 1.4; margin-top: 1em;\">There are a dozen places along this trail where I would have plummeted to my death (if I was fortunate), for the sole reason that I have never mastered the art of looking where I want to go instead of at what I want to avoid. And when I look at what I want to avoid, I inevitably ride straight for it. (You know, there&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.biblegateway.com\/passage\/?search=Romans%207:15&amp;version=NIV\">a Bible verse<\/a> that seems to address this very phenomenon, although it probably wasn&#8217;t originally intended for mountain bike riders.)<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Scattershooting while pondering one of life&#8217;s most important questions: will Pamela Anderson&#8217;s samba outfit on this season&#8217;s Dancing With the Stars be sufficiently intriguing to offset the appearance of Kate Gosselin? (Seriously, though: Pamela Anderson?!) You may have seen Rube Goldbergesque stunts before, but I assure you that you&#8217;ve seen nothing like this video from&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/2010\/03\/04\/100304_randomthursday\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Random Thursday<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-random-thursday","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9854,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243\/revisions\/9854"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericsiegmund.com\/fireant\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}